Some communities in Marin have banned or restricted gas leaf blowers.The original bans in Belvedere were enacted because of noise issues.Who wants to be woken up by your neighbor’s gardener at 8:00 A.M. Saturday morning?

I still have my old gas blower in the garage; it has not been used in years, not because I was the first to go Green or didn’t want to disturb the neighbors.They are just too hard to start, it would take me ten or fifteen minutes just to get the blower out of the garage and started.

My wife purchased an electric Toro blower/vacuum for the yard and she loves it.I was somewhat skeptical, how could that machine keep up with a Tim-the-tool-man Taylor gas blower?Well, it does and we never have to run to the gas station, worry about neighbors, and are as green as you can be without raking (that will be our next step).Not that I have anything against raking, it often works best, but for some of those tricky areas, nothing seems to work as well as a weed blower.

I think the trend is good, we need to learn to get away from these gas powered lawn mowers and blowers.Not only are the noisy but they also are not good for the environment and who wants to make our oil-producing neighbors richer than they already are.